How good is Geothermal Power at meeting supply and demand?

Question

Its for project on Renewable energy sources and i just cant find anything on how good it actually is.

Does anyone know or have any good websites?

Thanks

Answer 1

As a claims adjuster I handled a liability claim arising from a geo-thermal leak at a power generating plant.  

They gave me the nickel tour of the plant, and there is no shortage of heat beneath the earth's crust.  Once the hole is drilled down to the hot stuff, they blast the water down under high pressure, and the steam coming back up runs the turbines that turn the generator.  

I don't know why we don't generate all our electricity using geo-thermal.  It's extremely cost-effective (after the initial set-up cost), it's very reliable, it's unlimited and it is non-polluting (until a leak occurs which sends up a cloud of steam containing every mineral known to man [including lead])

I ended up declining payment of the claim because the policy had a pollution exclusion (liability from pollution has to be endorsed at a tremendous cost in premium).

The claimant wanted us to pay for all the lettuce he would grow on the effected land en-perpetuity.  If we had honored the claim, we would simply have bought the land from the guy, farmland is cheap . . . that's why it's farmland.  That's probably what our policyholder did.

Answer 2

You will need to consider geothermal on two scales, the utility sized installations that Pilgrim refers to and consumer installations. In Europe there are a growing number of houses that use ground source heat pumps to recover the heat in the ground and "multiply" it to produce usable heat for the home. A typical energy return is 5 or 6 times the energy invested in pumping and compression versus the heat recovered. On utility scales I assume this would be far larger. Have included a few sources to get you started.